High quality video photography and digital video photography equipment are increasingly accessible to a broad range of businesses and individuals, from large and small movie production studios to average consumers. With the proliferation of video cameras and video photographers, the amount of video footage that has been recorded has also increased. With the increase in video footage, there has also been an increase in the amount of footage recorded under a variety of conditions. These conditions include not only environmental and mechanical factors in video recording, but also the steadiness of the hand holding the camera, and the eye behind the viewfinder. The variance in recording conditions, and the hands performing the camera work have lead to a varied amount of jitter, or steadiness in the recorded video.
The problem of jitter has long existed. Today, there are some mechanical and hardware attempts to cope with jitter. These attempts suffer from a number of drawbacks. The higher quality mechanical solutions are prohibitively expensive and only available to specialized video production studios. Moreover, attempts to reduce unwanted camera motion involving a fixed camera (e.g., a camera mounting solution) do not always lend themselves to the conditions available for shooting the footage. Other attempts involving optical lens mechanisms fall short of correcting for jitter and are typically available only on more expensive camera equipment. Further, none of these solutions are available for video that has already been recorded. Thus, there is a need for an accessible and practical method for video editing that removes unwanted motion from a recorded video sequence of frames.